I'm actually quite ambivalent about Brian Epstein, believing him to be little more than a well-intentioned rube. I know Paul in particular was big on BE being 'the 5th Beatle' and whatnot, but his poor business management and savvy about the music industry had lasting - and I would say detrimental - effects on the Beatles. This is perhaps nowhere more (in)famous than in the creation of the publishing partnership between Lennon and McCartney that, to this day, sees the Lennon estate get royalties every time McCartney performs "Yesterday" live.

I've heard other bands talk about the importance of sharing song writing credit, regardless of who actually wrote the material; Van Halen are noted for this, with authorship of instrumentals like "Eruption" and "Spanish Fly" being credited to Eddie, Alex, David and Michael together. But the Beatles didn't operate like that, even after the creation of Northern Songs. The songwriting partnership between Lennon and McCartney was treated as one relationship, while George and Ringo were signed as individuals to Northern, and would receive sole authorship credit on their material. George self-published (Harrisongs) after his contract with Northern Songs lapsed in '68, so his estate controls the copyrights in and to "Here Comes The Sun" and "Something", for example. But McCartney is still beholden to Yoko for "Yesterday", "Blackbird", "Hey Jude", etc.

The same is, of course, true for McCartney collecting royalties anytime "Strawberry Fields" (or any other Lennon/Beatles song) is performed live. But Lennon isn't around anymore, and so does not have to face the ignominy of paying someone else for the privilege of performing his own song.

Then again, bringing it back to Epstein, it could be argued that he not only kept the band together longer than their egos ordinarily would have warranted, but their collective turmoil at his OD in '67 contributed to some of their greatest material. Remember, they weren't even in Britain when he died, and because of the attendant media attention could not go to his funeral. I'm sure that played hell with them, emotionally.

Lt. Dish wrote:"Blue Jay Way" is very Pink Floyd to me, and I'm good with that. It's a nice change of pace.

For a very long time, I actually thought "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" actually was a Floyd tune. The plodding, single-note progression under the Beethoven keyboard melody was just so David Gilmour to me.

tifosi77 wrote:I'm actually quite ambivalent about Brian Epstein, believing him to be little more than a well-intentioned rube. I know Paul in particular was big on BE being 'the 5th Beatle' and whatnot, but his poor business management and savvy about the music industry had lasting - and I would say detrimental - effects on the Beatles. This is perhaps nowhere more (in)famous than in the creation of the publishing partnership between Lennon and McCartney that, to this day, sees the Lennon estate get royalties every time McCartney performs "Yesterday" live.

I've heard other bands talk about the importance of sharing song writing credit, regardless of who actually wrote the material; Van Halen are noted for this, with authorship of instrumentals like "Eruption" and "Spanish Fly" being credited to Eddie, Alex, David and Michael together. But the Beatles didn't operate like that, even after the creation of Northern Songs. The songwriting partnership between Lennon and McCartney was treated as one relationship, while George and Ringo were signed as individuals to Northern, and would receive sole authorship credit on their material. George self-published (Harrisongs) after his contract with Northern Songs lapsed in '68, so his estate controls the copyrights in and to "Here Comes The Sun" and "Something", for example. But McCartney is still beholden to Yoko for "Yesterday", "Blackbird", "Hey Jude", etc.

The same is, of course, true for McCartney collecting royalties anytime "Strawberry Fields" (or any other Lennon/Beatles song) is performed live. But Lennon isn't around anymore, and so does not have to face the ignominy of paying someone else for the privilege of performing his own song.

Then again, bringing it back to Epstein, it could be argued that he not only kept the band together longer than their egos ordinarily would have warranted, but their collective turmoil at his OD in '67 contributed to some of their greatest material. Remember, they weren't even in Britain when he died, and because of the attendant media attention could not go to his funeral. I'm sure that played hell with them, emotionally.

tif, does Michael Jackson's estate still own half of the publishing rights to the Beatles' catalog or does Sony have them? I have no idea how that whole thing worked/works.

Sony/ATV administered the publishing rights (Northern Songs) on behalf of Michael Jackson, who acquired the catalog in the early 80s. In the early 2000s, MJ negotiated a deal to basically take ~$300 million as a loan from S/ATV in exchange for a 50% sale of his rights to the catalog (which included hundreds of artists' work) to Sony, with his remaining 50% acting as equity. That was not too long before MJ died, and as far as I know that's how things remain to this day, save a couple songs that were published outside the Northern Song banner in the early 60s.

More industry dronings by Tif follow. Ye be warned.

Spoiler:

Music copyrights are divided into two chunks: 1) is publishing, which is the words and music of a song, and 2) each individual master recording of that collection of words and music. Music publishers control the publishing, record labels control the masters. Example: Sony/ATV controls the song "A Little Help From My Friends", while EMI (Universal, nee Capitol, in the U.S.) controls the Beatles original recording, but Regal owns the Joe Cocker recording. (Regal is currently owned by Warner Bros Records, but back in the day it was part of Parlophone.... which was also EMI)

You can get a license to use a song (publishing) with your own recording, but you can't get a master license without also getting publishing approval. So publishing is really the key to the money machine in music. The Lennon-McCartney deal with Northern Songs in 1961 (or whatever it was) meant the songwriters - the artists who actually produced the material - split 50% of revenue, while the copyright administrator (eventually Sony/ATV and Michael Jackson) retained 50%. When MJ purchased Northern Songs in the mid-80s, McCartney hoped they could negotiate a raise, but Jackson said tough titty toenails.

When I first moved to L.A. in 1997, I did film & TV licensing at EMI-Capitol. If you think back to the use of "Twist And Shout" in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that license was issued without anyone at Apple Corps ever knowing about it, and it made them all very cranky indeed. Their recording agreements (and their publishing agreements) gave the copyright holders (EMI and Northern Songs, respectively) sole authority in how the repertoire was exploited, so there was no need to consult the artist. As a result, the Beatles renegotiated with EMI ("Twist And Shout" isn't their song, so publishing never came up) to get approval rights over film & TV licensing of their recordings.

Flash forward a few years, and Capitol Records finds itself with a seven-figure offer to use "Revolution" in a Nike commercial. This was close to 20 years before Zeppelin got that kind of money from Cadillac, btw. A lawyer at the label was faced with making the decision to follow up with repeated unreturned phone calls or go ahead and do the deal in the hopes the big payday would mollify the Beatles..... whooopsie. The commercial aired, and the Beatles threatened to take their music to another label when their agreement expired. In exchange for staying at EMI, they were granted an absurdly generous and artist-friendly deal; after about 1989-1990, I don't think it was financially possible for EMI to actually make any money selling Beatles music, but it was a prestige piece, a loss leader of sorts. For example, the Fabs got paid their (wildly generous) full royalty rate for every single unit that left the distribution center..... including promos. So if I wanted to send the Beatles catalog to a music supervisor to thank her for her millions of dollars of business, I had to write a letter to the C.F. frickin' O. of Capitol Records to plead my case. (Thankfully, his personal assistant was my girlfriend ) It used to be that you could take home your body weight in CDs every month, and no one batted an eye. But Beatles? Forget it. During my two+ years I got a grand total of three complete sets of their catalog; one for the aforementioned music supervisor, one for my department's library... and the other still rests comfortably on my media shelf fifteen years on, with the UPC code drilled through to mark it as a promo.

Anyhow, part of the fallout of the Nike commercial was the creation of a dedicated department to handle film & TV licensing. So in a very real (if indirect) way, I owe my first job to the alliance of Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.

tifosi77 wrote:Sony/ATV administered the publishing rights (Northern Songs) on behalf of Michael Jackson, who acquired the catalog in the early 80s. In the early 2000s, MJ negotiated a deal to basically take ~$300 million as a loan from S/ATV in exchange for a 50% sale of his rights to the catalog (which included hundreds of artists' work) to Sony, with his remaining 50% acting as equity. That was not too long before MJ died, and as far as I know that's how things remain to this day, save a couple songs that were published outside the Northern Song banner in the early 60s.

More industry dronings by Tif follow. Ye be warned.

Spoiler:

Music copyrights are divided into two chunks: 1) is publishing, which is the words and music of a song, and 2) each individual master recording of that collection of words and music. Music publishers control the publishing, record labels control the masters. Example: Sony/ATV controls the song "A Little Help From My Friends", while EMI (Universal, nee Capitol, in the U.S.) controls the Beatles original recording, but Regal owns the Joe Cocker recording. (Regal is currently owned by Warner Bros Records, but back in the day it was part of Parlophone.... which was also EMI)

You can get a license to use a song (publishing) with your own recording, but you can't get a master license without also getting publishing approval. So publishing is really the key to the money machine in music. The Lennon-McCartney deal with Northern Songs in 1961 (or whatever it was) meant the songwriters - the artists who actually produced the material - split 50% of revenue, while the copyright administrator (eventually Sony/ATV and Michael Jackson) retained 50%. When MJ purchased Northern Songs in the mid-80s, McCartney hoped they could negotiate a raise, but Jackson said tough titty toenails.

When I first moved to L.A. in 1997, I did film & TV licensing at EMI-Capitol. If you think back to the use of "Twist And Shout" in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that license was issued without anyone at Apple Corps ever knowing about it, and it made them all very cranky indeed. Their recording agreements (and their publishing agreements) gave the copyright holders (EMI and Northern Songs, respectively) sole authority in how the repertoire was exploited, so there was no need to consult the artist. As a result, the Beatles renegotiated with EMI ("Twist And Shout" isn't their song, so publishing never came up) to get approval rights over film & TV licensing of their recordings.

Flash forward a few years, and Capitol Records finds itself with a seven-figure offer to use "Revolution" in a Nike commercial. This was close to 20 years before Zeppelin got that kind of money from Cadillac, btw. A lawyer at the label was faced with making the decision to follow up with repeated unreturned phone calls or go ahead and do the deal in the hopes the big payday would mollify the Beatles..... whooopsie. The commercial aired, and the Beatles threatened to take their music to another label when their agreement expired. In exchange for staying at EMI, they were granted an absurdly generous and artist-friendly deal; after about 1989-1990, I don't think it was financially possible for EMI to actually make any money selling Beatles music, but it was a prestige piece, a loss leader of sorts. For example, the Fabs got paid their (wildly generous) full royalty rate for every single unit that left the distribution center..... including promos. So if I wanted to send the Beatles catalog to a music supervisor to thank her for her millions of dollars of business, I had to write a letter to the C.F. frickin' O. of Capitol Records to plead my case. (Thankfully, his personal assistant was my girlfriend ) It used to be that you could take home your body weight in CDs every month, and no one batted an eye. But Beatles? Forget it. During my two+ years I got a grand total of three complete sets of their catalog; one for the aforementioned music supervisor, one for my department's library... and the other still rests comfortably on my media shelf fifteen years on, with the UPC code drilled through to mark it as a promo.

Anyhow, part of the fallout of the Nike commercial was the creation of a dedicated department to handle film & TV licensing. So in a very real (if indirect) way, I owe my first job to the alliance of Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.

Wow. Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to post all that. I enjoyed the great insight and story.

In my last post I said that MJs remaining 50% stake was 'equity' for the loan from Sony..... hopefully the context made it clear that I meant to say "collateral" but suffered a minor aneurysm whilst typing.

I've learned a lot in this thread and don't have some of the technical music knowledge ans insight into the business aspects of the music industry. But I have some perspective of that time period since I'm so old and saw much of it. That makes much of it opinion and related to small town western Pa America which could be quite different from big city kids , adults or real music experts at that time.One of the things that seemed like a major change was the purchasing of music. Prior to the Beatles I didn't know any kids who bought albums. I don't remember seeing a lot of albums in the record sections of five & tens stores such as Murphy's, Neisners, Grants etc which have vanished. These were downtown cheap department stores which I guess would be a cross between a K mart (size wise) and dollar stores (cheesy item-wise). That's where most kids bought records and records were 45 singles. I had a friend who had the Revolver album and I was amazed that there was an album that had so many good songs on it. I did a calculation and realized that thogh an album was expensive by blue collar teenage standards, an album with lots of good sons was cheaper than buying a bunch of 45's that nearly a dollar each.The other startling development about 45's is that the Beatles put out such a volume of good songs is that their 45's had good songs on both sides of the record. Almost all 45's before that had an A side (good song / hit) and a B side(piece of crap song/ cover of someone else's record) that never got radio play. It probably also impacted the sale of record players ( stereo albums). Most kids listened to mono 45 singles om cheap suitcase type record players that could also play an album in mono. Everyone pretty much listened to small transistor on AM stations or car radios on AM stations. The same pal that had the Revolver album had a stereo (his mom's). That's the first time I ever heard a stereo and I was awe-struck. The Beatles were also dominating the radio with multiple hits being played in the same time period. It seemed unbelievable at that time. Even the prolific hit makers seemed to have a pattern of putting out a single until it played itself out and then releasing another. The Beatles would have 4 songs getting air play at the same time versus other popular singers / bands having 3 successful singles out in an entire year. Things have never seemed the same since.

tifosi77 wrote:Did I totally imagine redwill asking about the use of the song "Jessica" on Top Gear?

Hahaha! I figured it was putting too many questions to you and I abandoned it. The gist was what do you suppose Top Gear and the BBC have to do to play a non-Allman Bros. version of "Jessica" to a quarter-billion people every week? Also, I mentioned that it pissed me off that Clarkson attributed the song to Duane Allman instead of Dickey Betts.

tifosi77 wrote:Did I totally imagine redwill asking about the use of the song "Jessica" on Top Gear?

Hahaha! I figured it was putting too many questions to you and I abandoned it. The gist was what do you suppose Top Gear and the BBC have to do to play a non-Allman Bros. version of "Jessica" to a quarter-billion people every week? Also, I mentioned that it pissed me off that Clarkson attributed the song to Duane Allman instead of Dickey Betts.

Geezer wrote:I've learned a lot in this thread and don't have some of the technical music knowledge ans insight into the business aspects of the music industry. But I have some perspective of that time period since I'm so old and saw much of it. That makes much of it opinion and related to small town western Pa America which could be quite different from big city kids , adults or real music experts at that time.One of the things that seemed like a major change was the purchasing of music. Prior to the Beatles I didn't know any kids who bought albums. I don't remember seeing a lot of albums in the record sections of five & tens stores such as Murphy's, Neisners, Grants etc which have vanished. These were downtown cheap department stores which I guess would be a cross between a K mart (size wise) and dollar stores (cheesy item-wise). That's where most kids bought records and records were 45 singles. I had a friend who had the Revolver album and I was amazed that there was an album that had so many good songs on it. I did a calculation and realized that thogh an album was expensive by blue collar teenage standards, an album with lots of good sons was cheaper than buying a bunch of 45's that nearly a dollar each.The other startling development about 45's is that the Beatles put out such a volume of good songs is that their 45's had good songs on both sides of the record. Almost all 45's before that had an A side (good song / hit) and a B side(piece of crap song/ cover of someone else's record) that never got radio play. It probably also impacted the sale of record players ( stereo albums). Most kids listened to mono 45 singles om cheap suitcase type record players that could also play an album in mono. Everyone pretty much listened to small transistor on AM stations or car radios on AM stations. The same pal that had the Revolver album had a stereo (his mom's). That's the first time I ever heard a stereo and I was awe-struck. The Beatles were also dominating the radio with multiple hits being played in the same time period. It seemed unbelievable at that time. Even the prolific hit makers seemed to have a pattern of putting out a single until it played itself out and then releasing another. The Beatles would have 4 songs getting air play at the same time versus other popular singers / bands having 3 successful singles out in an entire year. Things have never seemed the same since.

I think the b-side gets a bad rap. Most people were just not interested. The flip side of Satisfaction is a far better song:

Geezer wrote:I've learned a lot in this thread and don't have some of the technical music knowledge ans insight into the business aspects of the music industry. But I have some perspective of that time period since I'm so old and saw much of it. That makes much of it opinion and related to small town western Pa America which could be quite different from big city kids , adults or real music experts at that time.

--- More of Geezer showing that the only requirement for enjoying this thread is appreciating the Beatles and remembering how we became music fans..."all those years ago"! ---

The Beatles were also dominating the radio with multiple hits being played in the same time period. It seemed unbelievable at that time. Even the prolific hit makers seemed to have a pattern of putting out a single until it played itself out and then releasing another. The Beatles would have 4 songs getting air play at the same time versus other popular singers / bands having 3 successful singles out in an entire year. Things have never seemed the same since.

I remember Murphy's and Grant's. I purchased the 45 of George Harrison's "All Those Years Ago" at Murphy's, I'm pretty sure.

I also remember wearing out my mum's Meet the Beatles album on her big old Magnavox suitcase stereo.

Does anyone remember these guys, Stars on 45? LOL!

They were huge on Top 40 at the time, because it's hard to say no to the Beatles, even when they've been bastardized to Hell and back.

Geezer wrote:I've learned a lot in this thread and don't have some of the technical music knowledge ans insight into the business aspects of the music industry. But I have some perspective of that time period since I'm so old and saw much of it. That makes much of it opinion and related to small town western Pa America which could be quite different from big city kids , adults or real music experts at that time.One of the things that seemed like a major change was the purchasing of music. Prior to the Beatles I didn't know any kids who bought albums. I don't remember seeing a lot of albums in the record sections of five & tens stores such as Murphy's, Neisners, Grants etc which have vanished. These were downtown cheap department stores which I guess would be a cross between a K mart (size wise) and dollar stores (cheesy item-wise). That's where most kids bought records and records were 45 singles. I had a friend who had the Revolver album and I was amazed that there was an album that had so many good songs on it. I did a calculation and realized that thogh an album was expensive by blue collar teenage standards, an album with lots of good sons was cheaper than buying a bunch of 45's that nearly a dollar each.The other startling development about 45's is that the Beatles put out such a volume of good songs is that their 45's had good songs on both sides of the record. Almost all 45's before that had an A side (good song / hit) and a B side(piece of crap song/ cover of someone else's record) that never got radio play. It probably also impacted the sale of record players ( stereo albums). Most kids listened to mono 45 singles om cheap suitcase type record players that could also play an album in mono. Everyone pretty much listened to small transistor on AM stations or car radios on AM stations. The same pal that had the Revolver album had a stereo (his mom's). That's the first time I ever heard a stereo and I was awe-struck. The Beatles were also dominating the radio with multiple hits being played in the same time period. It seemed unbelievable at that time. Even the prolific hit makers seemed to have a pattern of putting out a single until it played itself out and then releasing another. The Beatles would have 4 songs getting air play at the same time versus other popular singers / bands having 3 successful singles out in an entire year. Things have never seemed the same since.

I think the b-side gets a bad rap. Most people were just not interested. The flip side of Satisfaction is a far better song:

I agree to the point that there were exceptions. But the Stones were also a group that were kind of in the minority in having a volume of good/popular songs. Most groups / singers had one or two good songs. Some of the Brit invasion groups such as the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers had a couple hits but didn't have a lot of good songs(IMO). The Kinks didn't come close to the number of hits but I'd say they had a substantial amount of good songs. From my perspective most of the B sides I heard I never listened to a second time.

The Kinks were huge in the UK and Europe, but not that big in the USA, in large because of a touring ban imposed on them. Imo, their body of work in the second half of the 60's rivals anything by anyone.

The Beatles (and George Marin specifically) were pioneers in multi-tracking. The predominant method of recording (and only way for the first several years of the Beatles) was the 4 track tape recorder. I hope I'm explaining this right, but how I understand it is that each track contains a discrete instrument or set of instruments. So, you'd have drums on a track, vocals on track 2, guitars on 3, and bass on track 4. This made for a restrictive method of recording...so the Beatles began multi-tracking, essentially expanding 4 tracks into 16 or more tracks.

They would record on a 4 track and then mix those 4 tracks down to one track of a new 4 (or 8) track tape, opening up three or more tracks (which could in turn be multi-tracked). Obviously, this opened up the amount of sound that could be put on a sound recording.

tifosi77 wrote:Did I totally imagine redwill asking about the use of the song "Jessica" on Top Gear?

Hahaha! I figured it was putting too many questions to you and I abandoned it. The gist was what do you suppose Top Gear and the BBC have to do to play a non-Allman Bros. version of "Jessica" to a quarter-billion people every week? Also, I mentioned that it pissed me off that Clarkson attributed the song to Duane Allman instead of Dickey Betts.

I typed out a typically-wordy response that had your question quoted, and when I hit the Submit button I got an error that said something like "The requested information does not exist". Thought I lost my marble.